About the same time there was erected the first cabin on the Watauga River, as is generally believed, by a man of the name of William Bean (or Been), hunter and frontier soldier from Pittsylvania County, Virginia.

This man, who had hunted on the Watauga with Daniel Boone in 1760, chose as the site of his dwelling the place of the old hunting camp near the mouth of Boone's Creek.

He soon began to have neighbors.
Meanwhile the Regulation Movement stirred the Back Country of both the Carolinas.

In 1768, the year in which William Bean built his cabin on the bank of the Watauga, five hundred armed Regulators in North Carolina, aroused by irregularities in the conduct of public office, gathered to assert their displeasure, but dispersed peaceably on receipt of word from Governor Tryon that he had ordered the prosecution of any officer found guilty of extortion.

Edmund Fanning, the most hated of Lord Granville's agents, though convicted, escaped punishment.